A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
